Alarm Management in Critical Care Environments
Summary
Alarm management in critical care environments addresses the challenge posed by the continuous stream of alerts generated by physiologic monitors, infusion pumps and ventilators. While clinical alarms are vital for the early detection of patient deterioration, high rates of false positives and non-actionable alarms can overwhelm staff, leading to alarm fatigue and potentially jeopardising patient safety. A comprehensive approach integrates tailored alarm thresholds, human factors engineering, interoperability standards and robust standard operating procedures. Technological advances—including signal-processing algorithms, alarm customisation software and artificial intelligence—enable real-time filtering of artefact and aggregation of related alerts, reducing nuisance alarms. Equally important are interdisciplinary training, ongoing usability testing and the involvement of frontline clinicians in policy development. Together, these elements support a balance between sensitivity and specificity, ensuring that alarms remain a reliable safeguard in high-acuity settings while minimising disruption to care and cognitive burden on health-care teams.
Research from Nature Portfolio
No recent Nature Portfolio content available.
Alarm Management in Critical Care Environments publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in alarm management in critical care environments across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Alarm fatigue: A state of desensitisation and reduced responsiveness to clinical alarms due to excessive or non-actionable alerts.
Clinical alarm: An auditory or visual alert generated by a monitoring device to signal a potential patient safety event.
Non-actionable alarm: An alert that does not require clinical intervention or is false in indicating a patient emergency.
Physiologic monitor: A medical device that continuously measures and displays vital signs such as heart rate, blood pressure and oxygen saturation.
Interoperability: The ability of diverse medical devices and health-care information systems to exchange, interpret and use data cohesively.
References
- Impact of Alarm Fatigue on the Work of Nurses in an Intensive Care Environment—A Systematic Review. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (2020).
- Clinical Requirements of Future Patient Monitoring in the Intensive Care Unit: Qualitative Study. JMIR Medical Informatics (2019).
- Improvements in Patient Monitoring in the Intensive Care Unit: Survey Study. Journal of Medical Internet Research (2020).
- Testing physiologic monitor alarm customization software to reduce alarm rates and improve nurses’ experience of alarms in a medical intensive care unit. PLOS ONE (2018).
- Reducing False Alarms of Intensive Care Online‐Monitoring Systems: An Evaluation of Two Signal Extraction Algorithms. Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine (2011).
- Artificial Intelligence Technologies for Coping with Alarm Fatigue in Hospital Environments Because of Sensory Overload: Algorithm Development and Validation. Journal of Medical Internet Research (2019).
- Alarm fatigue and moral distress in ICU nurses in COVID-19 pandemic. BMC Nursing (2022).
About these summaries
This Nature Research Intelligence Topic summary is created with the cited references and a large language model. We take care to ground generated text with facts, and have systems in place to gain human feedback on the overall quality of the process in line with our AI principles. We strive to create accurate and useful summaries for people unfamiliar with the research topic and that supports this goal. These pages are a beta release and will be updated as we learn how best to help people gain value from a research topic summary.
Turn complex research questions into confident strategic decisions
When you're under pressure to set direction, justify investment, or understand your competitive position, you need more than raw data — you need trusted insights you can act on.
Benchmark your performance against global peers using robust, methodologically sound analysis.
Combine quantitative metrics with qualitative expert insight to uncover strengths, gaps and emerging opportunities.
Gain tailored, decision-ready recommendations aligned to your strategic priorities.
Talk to us to learn more about our data dashboards and bespoke strategy reports.
Grow research skills, confidence and careers with training built for every stage of the research lifecycle.
Developed with Nature Portfolio journal Editors and internationally renowned experts. Discover three ways to learn:
Self-paced, online courses in convenient bite-sized units, covering key skills across scientific writing, publishing, grant writing, data analysis, and more.
Expert trainer-led workshops with hands-on exercises and real-time feedback across core research skills, delivered via interactive group sessions.
Editor-led workshops combining core principles in writing and publishing, personalised 1:1 feedback from Nature Portfolio Editors and hands-on exercises.
Explore course catalogues and workshop agendas, enquire about the options or request institutional pricing.